Despite the idealism represented by the No Child Left Behind law’s mandate for accountability in education, deaf students historically and on average have performed far below grade level on standardized tests. To resolve this contradiction in deaf education, this collection presents a spectrum of perspectives from a diverse corps of education experts to suggest a constructive synthesis of worthy ideals, hard realities, and pragmatic solutions. Contributors to this study include volume editors Robert C. Johnson and Ross E. Mitchell, Ed Bosso, Michael Bello, Betsy J. Case, Patrick Costello, Stephanie W. Cawthon, Joseph E. Fischgrund, Courtney Foster, Christopher Johnstone, Michael Jones, Jana Lollis, Pat Moore, Barbara Raimondo, Suzanne Recane, Richard C. Steffan, Jr., Sandra J. Thompson, Martha L. Thurlow, and Elizabeth Towles-Reeves. These noted educators and researchers employ experiences from Massachusetts, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Illinois and California to support their findings about the dilemma facing deaf students and their teachers. They assess the intent and flexibility of federal law; achievement data regarding deaf students; potential accommodations and universal design to make tests more accessible; possible alternatives for deaf students not ready for conventional assessments; accounts of varying degrees of cooperation and conflict between schools and state education departments; and the day-to-day efforts of teachers and school administrators to help deaf students measure up to the new standards. By presenting these wide-ranging insights together, Testing Deaf Students in an Age of Accountability provides a unique opportunity to create genuine means to educate deaf students for the only test that matters, that of life.

This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity?The essays here argue that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and a matrix for invention. Broadly conceived, the notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming, kinship and the foreign, disposable populationswithin a global political economy, queerness and the death drive, the parapoetic, electronic textuality, invention and accountability, political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy, art and art history, visuality, political theory, criticism and critique, psychoanalysis, gender analysis, architecture, literature, art). The volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future.

In 1949, as postwar Texas was steadily becoming more urban and calls for education reform were gathering strength throughout the state and nation, State Representative Claud Gilmer and State Senator A. M. Aikin Jr. sponsored a bill designed to increase salaries for Texas schoolteachers. Also tied to the bill, however, were provisions related to sweeping changes in school funding and access to education for minorities.   In To Get a Better School System, Gene B. Preuss examines not only the public policy wrangling and historical context leading up to and surrounding the Gilmer-Aikin legislation, but also places the discussion in the milieu of the national movement for school reform.  

Total communication, a method utilizing a combination of visual and auditory cues in an attempt to maximize comprehension, has long been a focus of debate by the deaf community, families of deaf children, and education professionals. For perhaps the first time, this book documents total communication’s historical and philosophical roots and analyzes the strengths and limitations of total communication's elemental parts and their salient linguistic properties.

This book profiles local and national efforts to transform urban education and reinvent urban teacher preparation. It describes real programs in real urban schools that have developed policy initiatives that promote educational equity, community-based curricula, and teacher education and parent empowerment programs that emphasize democratic collaboration among universities, urban teachers, parents, and community members. By involving all stakeholders, this comprehensive approach provides a model for creating urban schools that not only excite and inspire, but also serve as engines for social change. Contending that urban education reform will fail without public engagement and a commitment to social justice, the contributors challenge urban educators to become accountable to their students and the communities they serve.

South Africaís provincial education departments have been reduced to provincial administrations, for reasons that include the powerful role national government plays in delivering education services. This book looks in detail at education spending and asks: Can we afford to maintain administrations that cannot possibly change the course of poor quality education and engineer a brighter future for our poor and deprived learners? The authors believe this question and the future role of provincial education departments need to be discussed, openly and publicly, without delay.